Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Meshugas of the Yiddish Theater in America (42 page)

In the course of examining prison records, researchers came upon yet another sad irony. The name of Abraham Goldfaden, father of the Yiddish Theater, had been kept alive in the camps. The melody of his first popular song, “Raisins and Almonds,” was sung as it had been in the nurseries of New York. But the lyrics had been altered. In
Ghetto Tango,
an album of wartime Yiddish Theater produced in 2000, Adrienne Cooper and Zalmen Mlotek supply the concentration camp version:

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P
RESIDENT ROOSEVELT'S DEATH
in April 1945 called forth a great mourning from every Jewish enclave. This, despite what had been learned about the administration's refusal to permit the bombing of railroad tracks leading to Auschwitz-Birkenau, a policy that might have saved hundreds of thousands. Only after the unconditional surrender of the Germans, followed by photographs and personal accounts by Holocaust survivors, did the administration of Harry Truman agree to overhaul its immigration policies. Jewish survivors
were allowed to enter the United States, most of them shattered by their experiences and bewildered by the strange, loud, unregulated world of New York City.

Inspired by this remnant of a once vital culture, the tireless Ben Hecht argued for a Jewish state in his historic show
A Flag Is Born.
Staged at the Alvin Theater on 52nd Street, it starred Paul Muni as a weary veteran of the camps, and a rising young actor, Marlon Brando, as a young Zionist. Stella Adler's favorite student, Marlon had fallen completely under her spell. Wherever she went, onstage or off, he followed, socially, aesthetically, politically. In the melodrama, the young survivor thinks of suicide after his experience in the killing fields. Soldiers come from the Middle East, offering him a home in Palestine. As he leaves the charnel house of Europe for his new country, he speaks out to the audience, indicting his co-religionists:

“Where were you Jews when the killing was going on? When the six million were burned and buried alive in lime, where were you? Where was your voice crying out against the slaughter? We didn't hear any voice. There was no voice. You Jews of America! You Jews of England! Where was your cry of rage? Nowhere! Because you were ashamed to cry as Jews! A curse on your silence.”

Brando was to recall that his accusatory tone “sent chills through the audience.” At several performances “Jewish girls got out of their seats and screamed and cried from the aisles in sadness, and at one, when I asked, ‘Where were you when six million Jews were being burned to death in the ovens of Auschwitz?' a woman was so overcome with anger and guilt that she rose and shouted back at me, ‘Where were
you
?’”

At the time, the actor went on, “there was a great deal of soulsearching within the Jewish community over whether they had done enough to stop the slaughter of their people—some argued that they should have applied pressure on President Roosevelt, for example—so the speech touched a sensitive nerve.” So sensitive that contributions poured in. Before
A Flag Is Born
finished its tour of Detroit, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Boston, and Chicago, a million dollars had come in. A large portion of that money was used to buy the
Abril,
a four-hundredton yacht. Renamed the
Ben Hecht,
it was used to ferry six hundred Holocaust survivors to Palestine. The British government was administrating the area, and strict immigration policies were in effect. But when the ship docked, London sent instructions that the British officials
were to back off rather than create an international incident. It was the start of 10 Downing Street's new Middle East foreign policy, and the first giant step in the creation of Israel.

POSTWAR
, the Eastern European survivors who made their way to New York City constituted a stream, not a wave. But they were enough to provide the Yiddish Theater with a new audience. A handful of veteran showfolk gratefully returned to their typewriters and pianos. Sholem Secunda composed music for
Hard to Be Honest,
a celebration of the Jewish spirit starring the aging soubrette Henrietta Jacobson and a fresh comedian, Fyvush Finkel. The
New York Post
critic derived some mild amusement from the clowns, but he was impressed by the melodies. “Mr. Secunda's synagogue background colors his popular songs as definitely as Sir Arthur Sullivan's choir boy training makes itself felt in the Gilbert and Sullivan operas.”

The warm reception did not go unnoticed by Maurice Schwartz. For the first time in more than a decade the town had an influx of Yiddish speakers. They could very easily become the new audience so necessary for the Yiddish Art Theater to survive. He gambled with his remaining funds and in the season of 1945–46 presented
Three Gifts,
an adaptation of an I. L. Peretz story that took on a new significance in the wake of the Holocaust.

A poor man dies and arrives at the celestial court. Since his good deeds do not outweigh his bad ones he is barred from entry. An archangel takes pity on him: times are harsh even in heaven; some of the lesser angels can be bribed. If he can find three rare and beautiful gifts for the seraphs, he can get in.

Sent back to earth he sees a crime being committed—bandits are holding up an old Jewish businessman. They want him to hand over his greatest treasure. The robbery victim silently prays: “The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away, blessed be the name of the Lord! You're not born
with it, and you can't take it with you.” The thieves continue to plunder his satchels until they come upon a small bag. He tries to shout “Don't touch that!” but when he opens his mouth he is slain. The robbers rip open the sack, expecting to find jewels and gold. Instead they find dirt—“Just a little soil. From the earth of Palestine, for his grave.”

The petitioner to heaven offers this as his first gift to the angels.

The second gift is a pin. He has removed it from the body of a beautiful Jewish girl who was murdered for walking past a church on Sunday. She used the pin to keep her ripped dress from revealing her battered body, even as she was dying.

The third gift is a yarmulke, taken from the corpse of an old Jew forced to walk a gauntlet for crimes that no one can recall. During the beating his skullcap came off. Rather than go on without it, he walks back through the gauntlet of anti-Semites and is killed by them.

In the world's eyes, these presents are worth no more than a few pennies. And yet they prove valuable enough to allow a poor man to enter heaven—evidence of the power of faith over death. The rich man's bag of soil is a pledge to the Jewish people who have maintained a presence in the Holy Land since the days of Moses. The woman's modesty demonstrates that she remains human in the presence of monsters. As for the old man, his devotion to Jehovah outweighed all other considerations including pain and annihilation.

The relevance of
Three Gifts
needed no program notes. If some of the performances were overwrought, this was considered more than appropriate. In the
Times,
Brooks Atkinson complimented the production. In his view the “Yiddish Art Theater has always been one of the most interesting stage organizations in this city. It always produces plays in good taste. The style of acting is warm and excitable.”

Schwartz went on to stage and star in
Song of the Dnieper,
a look back at a Russian
shtetl,
and in 1947 startled everyone by taking the part of Shylock. He had sworn never to play that Shakespearean role, and in a sense he kept his vow. This Shylock was the Bardic character, but he did not speak Shakespeare's lines. He came from an obscure Hebrew novel written decades ago,
Shylock, ha'yehudi mi'venetsia
(Shylock, the Jew of Venice).

In program notes Maurice sought to defend Shylock, and by extension all who shared his faith. “There is no case in history indicating that a Jew ever sought a pound of flesh as security for a loan,” instructed Schwartz. Such an obscenity was unthinkable “due to the laws laid
down by the Jewish religion…. Jews must salt the meat of fowl and cattle not only to make it kosher but in order that not even a drop of blood should remain in the meat. Since Shylock is a very religious man, it is impossible that he could have exacted such terms in his contract with Antonio.”

Critics downtown and uptown wanted to believe those words. Even before
Shylock and His Daughter
opened, a conservative Yiddish paper, the
Morgen Zhurnal,
observed that Shakespeare's usurer was “a historical lie, a falsehood that has cost Jews very dearly.” It had to be “once and for all erased.” In the
New York Post,
Richard Watts added, “It would most assuredly be both arrogant and untrue to suggest that this new Yiddish drama sets out to put Shakespeare in his place. It is merely an effort to view the same story and the same set of characters from the standpoint of modern historical knowledge and to right an unintentional wrong.”

Two guards set the tone in the opening minutes:

Within the hostile environment of Venice, the widower Shylock has raised his only living child, Jessica. Now that she's come of age he has chosen a husband for her: Samuel Morro, son of a friend killed during the Inquisition.

But Jessica has been secretly keeping company with Lorenzo, the gentile manager of Shylock's bank. Gratiano and Salanio are in on the romance, and demand 3,000 ducats to keep their mouths shut. Lorenzo is not a wealthy man, and he asks his friend Antonio for a loan to silence the blackmailers.

Antonio also detests Shylock. But his money is on the ocean, heavily invested in merchant ships. And so he must go to the Jew for cash. Without knowing what the money is for, Shylock agrees to the loan. But not without answering Antonio's anti-Semitism with a paraphrase of Shakespeare's “Do we not bleed” speech:

To underline his sentiments, Shylock loftily refuses to charge interest for the loan.

That smile makes the difference. Shylock is not a man seeking revenge; he is instead a master of irony, at once proud and dismissive. To no avail. Shylock learns all too soon that he will lose Jessica—not to a malady, the way his other children were lost, but to something he dreads even more: conversion to Christianity.